Permanent residency, legal query, a lost friend

“I submitted my papers last February and passed all the requirements. My problem is that I want to visit my country for one month. Is that OK?

“I plan to take one month of leave from my job and resume work when I return to Japan.”

Are you waiting to hear back about whether your permanent resident visa has been approved, or has it already been approved?

In either case, it is perfectly fine to leave Japan for a month, as long as you as have a re-entry permit that won’t expire while you’re away.

However, if you are waiting to hear about the status of your permanent resident visa application, you may receive a notification while you’re away potentially asking you to come back into the immigration office by a certain date — a deadline you wouldn’t want to miss.

So if this is your situation, perhaps you should call immigration before you leave Japan and check with them first, so they know you may not be in Japan during a certain time period.

Low asks, “Am I correct to quote your Notary Public law as ‘Law of Notary Public Japan 1908’?”

Yes, that is correct. Though the law has been revised and updated over the years since 1908, it is still referred to as the Notary Public Law of 1908.

The law is kōshōninhō in Japanese, written in Meiji 41.

Rekha Rao, from India, is trying to locate an old friend who currently lives in Japan:

“I am looking for Syoko Kurokawa. We were pen friends for four years from 1962 and lost touch after I went to medical school. I tried to locate her in Kyoto and Tokyo when I visited, with the help of others, though was unsuccessful.

“Syoko may be in her early sixties. She studied at Kyoto Girls High School, and lived in Gotsu City in Shimane Prefecture in the 1960s.

“She was very good at drawing and wrote English beautifully, and she had planned to be a teacher.